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I hope you enjoyed the story, I of course have no idea if you did until I can get access to a PC again. I've told this story over and over again and as you can see from the articles and entries on the internet that I linked to in the posts, this wasn't some secret story; I just filled in the blanks with my own personal recollections. Plus, the recollections of the conversation are just that - recollections and not official quotes. The pictures all except the ones that showed me with Jamil are all available on the internet.And, what happened to Jamil? Well here's a link to her Google search results
and Wikipedia entry which sadly does not mention Harrisdirect. I actually had one last interaction with her that lasted a few months almost daily. As Jamil told me on our golf photo shoot or via a personal email (I don't remember which one), she was digitized and became your first-person shooter side kick in the game Half-Life 2.

Again, hope you enjoyed the story. It is always one of my favorite personal stories to retell. One more look at the photo....and another...

One of my favorite write ups was done over at iMedia by Joe Jaffe called Harrisdirect Adds a Human Touch. The article highlighted our strategy for using people in their daily lives and how investing helped them achieve their goals. We knew we had a great strategy going and continued to prime the pump with new direct investors, so I fought to bring her back. The one caveat that I had with the second shoot was, I had to bring Megan W. along to make sure we had no eye-popping t-shirt issues again. So, we worked with Modem to come up with two ideas, Elsie golfing and Elsie performing yoga in the same loft again. On the way over, our photographer warned me not to mention anything about her online following or results we were seeing; he didn't want her to be offended and therefore ruin the photo shoot.

Right after the yoga part, Jamil came up to me and pulled pages and pages of printouts
from her fan following online. And, she was excited to meet with the marketing team. I was relieved to stop my acting and be myself again. After we chatted for a while and some photos were taken, we were off to Brooklyn for the golf shoot. BTW - my hug was more of a thanks for delivering on my account signup objectives and hopes for a great follow-up campaign. Fast forward to this call on the way over to Brooklyn when I realized that Jamil was not in the van with me and the photographer.Eric: ModemAE, where is Jamil?

ModemAE: Ummm, she's with us.

Eric: Well, don't you think it is a problem that you have the model and I have the photographer? Shouldn't she be with the photographer?

Photographer: Wow, Eric and ModemAE are having an alpha male fight!

Eric: Yeah, I'm the client and she should be with me!

ModemAE: (realizing that I'm half-joking) No, she's with me....

Well, we arrived at the golf course without any real fights where we met up with another
Modem AE who had the golf clubs. When Jamil showed up, she of course walked over to him. He originally thought he was going to teach her, but sensing a once in a life-time opportunity for a happily married man, I pulled rank on him and said "I'm showing her how to golf, you go over the shots we need with the photographer." Yes, rank has its privileges plus I extracted some amount of revenge over stealing Jamil on the ride over.

The photoshoot went very, very well and we had even more photos than we
could have imagined. The photos spanned two online agencies and the campaign lived on. We used her in a number of creative executions and Elsie Lee remained the focus of our creative strategy up until the middle of 2005. It wasn't that the results still weren't very good, after all the ads ran for 3 years and were still consistently our most popular ads, but as they say, all good things must come to an end.

After that day, there were many Director's pressuring me to pull the ads and wrote emails to this effect. I'm sure quite a few people thought I should be removed and considered this the biggest black eye in the history of this proud online pioneer. They however, didn't have the data that I had at my finger tips. I ended up writing a one page response defending the ads which I pinned on my desk for the next 3 years and didn't remove until my last day in the office. Of course, I don't have the data, but the results went like this:

Click rates sky rocketed (no surprise there)

Conversion rates dropped a little (again no surprise)

Brand awareness metrics, intent to purchase and any other branding metric you can think of went WAY UP.

New accounts per day increased and cost per new account decreased

Clearly, we had a winner because for all the bad press that we had out there,
it was overwhelmed by the added new accounts. Eventually, things calmed down in the office and almost everyone could laugh about launch day. We even had her image up on the home page (face only) and that ad went on to be the most popular ad we ran for THREE years running. I'd go to meetings and people would always mention that ad when they heard I was from Harrisdirect. Yahoo flew me out to present the results and I have Jerry Yang's autograph of a screen shot of Elsie. Everything was great until we started noticing more activity in message boards again.

It seems a blog, Deftone.com and a few other websites were tracking (or stalking) Elsie Lee. There was even an analysis of the removal of her nipples from the ads and some commentary on what was going on (simple, I was getting yelled at). Elsie had a cult following online; it was so bad, that I actually started running PPC ads on the term Elsie Lee or Elsie Lee, Harrisdirect to take advantage of the traffic. There was even a contractor who posted her resume online with the following words towards the bottom "I am not the Elsie Lee from Harrisdirect". For months and maybe up to a year, they couldn't figure out her real name, but clearly everyone liked the ads. We liked them so much and knew of the cult following, that we decided to bring Jamil back for round 2....

Late Friday afternoon, we get a phone call from an irate female customer complaining that we were degrading women; however, she never mentioned we had a nipple problem with the ads. We just assumed she didn't like the fact that we were using a young attractive woman for selling financial services. That was the tip of the iceberg.

The market opens up Tuesday morning and our giant online ad campaign launches right when the TV goes live (Elsie was only in print). The ads were click rate optimized so that the best performing ad was shown the most times. Unfortunately, the ad that was being shown the most times was a giant 160x800 un-airbrushed ad on the NY Times. The other eye popping ads were an introductory message on MarketWatch.com as well as a 728x90 ad on Yahoo Finance's home page that expanded below. Within 15 minutes of the market opening we had about 100 written customer complaints and so did many of the websites. In fact, this was the first time that I learned that a Compliance Department in a Financial Services Company monitors message boards, because we were all over them.

Megan got the offending ads pulled down as soon as we found out, but the pain didn't end there. The remaining ads were moving or as some jealous Director's in the company said were jiggling and this offended customers too (I think they were trying to follow the dots with their eyes). I had numerous calls with Brenda, the president of Harrisdirect, Bruce S, as well as Brenda's boss Susan P. Around 2 PM that day the following call takes place....

Brenda: Eric, have you fixed the ads and made sure that none of the other ads have a (nipple) problem?

Eric: Brenda, I've been staring at this women's chest for 5 hours now, I can't tell what I'm seeing.

Brenda: But, are they fixed?

Eric: Brenda, sometimes I see something, sometimes I don't, and sometimes I see a shadow. So, I think we are good to go. If I have to look at another pair of breasts today I think I will scream.

Brenda: Ok, let's not go that far. Did you eat lunch? Why don't you take a break?

Eric: Brenda, I don't know if you know this about men. We can not think about food and women at the same time. Kinda of affects the same region of our brains....

Once I was sure the ads were fixed, off they went back into rotation, the entire nipple gate issue over or so I thought....

The original photo shoot was done in a loft in downtown NYC. I was not there, so all I can tell you is what I was told by the agency and marketing team that was there.

Evidently, the loft was a little cold, but nobody noticed it and certainly not Jamil. She went into one of the bedrooms and put on a white t-shirt and came out for the photo shoot. Of course, she was gorgeous but nobody noticed anything out of the ordinary. That's is until a few weeks later.

The online team waited anxiously for the photos because we were getting squeezed on the back end for time. The photos went over to Modem Media and then after a week I had a creative review with them. The mood was a little tense because we were running out of time to hit our launch date to coincide with the offline campaign. Right after this call, I had to review the creatives with my boss, Brenda T. who was head of North American Marketing for BMO Investorline and Harrisdirect.

The first review was held with my account team at Modem (all men), myself, Jackie P, Megan W, and Kari F. The first ad we saw was Joe from one of the commercials and what was interesting about Joe was that the ads were created in Flash (first time for this company and I had to fight to keep it by the way) and Joe's photo moved up and down to grab your attention. The second ad was for Robin and buxom beauty with the same movement.

Finally, they showed the Elsie Lee ad, which also moved. When compared with the print execution, Jamil was even more radiant and the ad definitely popped in more ways the one. Of course being the male, I noticed what was popping out to me, but given my politically correct training from AT&T, I waited for one of my female direct reports to say something...the review went like this:

Megan: <stone faced and serious> Yes it is. Kari what do you think....

Kari: <smiling and nodding her head up and down> Yep and....

Jackie: <interrupting Kari> Hey, she's got her headlights on!

Eric: <relieved and voice increasing> Thank god somebody said something. Come on guys. I can't show this. You are going to fix her. I can't do this.

Male Voice for Modem: We like her just the way she is.

Eric: <stunned, but not surprised given the male/female ratio on this call> Well. I'll tell you what. I have to show it to my boss, Brenda. She's from Canada and not uptight by these things, but in the outside chance she says keep it, you'll get your wish. Otherwise, you are going to have to airbrush them.

Of course when I showed Elsie to Brenda, she wasn't up tight, but did have me guarantee that we can air brush her, which I assured her we could. A week later, Modem sent Megan over 80 creative assets for trafficking which Megan put live within a few hours. See, at the time, the publishers that we were using (MarketWatch, Yahoo, NY Times and others) didn't require prior approval for our creatives. So, as soon as Megan loaded them into our ad server, BlueStreak, they were live in an hour; probably around 4PM on the Friday before Memorial Day....we didn't notice that three ads were not airbrushed...

--Not sure why this never posted...so I'm re-posting for you fans out there. Sorry---

I've been meaning to write this story for a long time and was going to wait until the official 5 year anniversary, but since I will be unable to post for this coming week, I thought it would be great to load up some posts for you. And, what better story to tell then the Life and Times of Harrisdirect's Direct Investor Elsie Lee. Don't know the story of one of the greatest banner ads of all time? Well sit back and enjoy the story as it unfolds and if you are in this advertising space, you will enjoy learning about an ad that was Harrisdirect's most served ad for 3 years running.

Harrisdirect was the online brokerage company formerly known as CSFBdirect which was formerly known as DLJdirect which was formerly known as PCFN (try saying that in an intro). It existed up until E*Trade completed the acquisition in the fall of 2005. In the summer of 2001, the company then known as CSFBdirect was running an integrated offline/online advertising campaign starring a series of direct investors shot in black and white with a hint of red. The red was from the CSFBdirect logo.

After 9-11 we pretty much stopped all advertising and were sold to the Bank of Montreal. The company was named Harridirect which combined the name of BMO's US Bank Operations, Harris Bank, with the direct part of the CSFBdirect name. Plus, Harrisdirect picked up an upscale version of the Harris lion (Hubert). One of things that attracted BMO to Harrisdirect, was the synergies in marketing by going after consumers that wanted to direct their own investments - hence direct investors.

I ran a series of interim campaigns that demonstrated to the BMO personnel
that online advertising was an effective channel for acquiring customers and (I'm assuming here) that I actually knew what I was doing. I was never told this, but I always felt that the CSFBdirect marketing folks pretty much auditioned for our jobs. The interim campaigns that I ran with the help of Megan W, Jackie P, and Kari F were a lot of fun, featured some other direct investors, and we even tested some Eyeblaster ads that featured animals running across the screen being chased by a Harris lion. For more information, see Eyeblaster's case study.

It was that early spring of 2002, that we started developing plans for a major re-branding campaign set to launch at the end of May 2002. The offline advertising team that included then named advertising agency Messner (now Euro RSCG) was working on our campaign, while the online team led by myself with then named online advertising agency Modem Media waited for the creatives. And, that wait, dear friends, turned out to be well worth it.

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